CineLinkr #5: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
After Hours is a 1985 Martin Scorsese film about a mild-mannered word processor named Paul Hackett who goes to SoHo for a date, misses his cab home, and then spends the next eight hours being chased through lower Manhattan by increasingly hostile strangers while unable to find $1.50 for the subway. It is a comedy. The tricky category in today's puzzle is "films set in a single frenzied night" and it is the best entry in that category by virtue of how specifically, methodically wrong everything goes.
🟢 Easy: Starring Morgan Freeman
Movies: The Shawshank Redemption · Driving Miss Daisy · Bruce Almighty · Invictus
Morgan Freeman's screen presence is built on a quality that's extremely hard to fake: he sounds like he's been exactly right about something before, and he's comfortable waiting for you to catch up. That quality serves him differently across these four films.
The Shawshank Redemption is his all-timer. Red's narration carries the film, it's one of the few cases where a narrator's voice is doing half the emotional work. The film also lost the Best Picture Oscar to Forrest Gump in 1994. Both of those sentences are true simultaneously.
Driving Miss Daisy is the one that won Best Picture (1990), though Freeman wasn't nominated for acting that year. He was nominated for Shawshank four years later and still didn't win. The Academy and Morgan Freeman have a complicated relationship that only resolved in 2005 with Million Dollar Baby.
Bruce Almighty has Freeman playing God, which is a casting choice that arrived at the only logical destination. Jim Carrey gets to be God for a week; Freeman hands over the office keys like he's done the job for long enough and could use a Tuesday off.
Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2009) is about Nelson Mandela using the 1995 Rugby World Cup as a reconciliation project. Freeman carried the physicality and affect of Mandela with a dignity that earned him his sixth Academy Award nomination.
🟡 Medium: Tom Hanks Movies
Movies: Cast Away · Forrest Gump · Philadelphia · Big
Two consecutive Best Actor Oscars. Philadelphia in 1993, Forrest Gump in 1994. The only actors to do this before him were Spencer Tracy in 1937-38 and Luise Rainer in the same years. Hanks went back-to-back in the middle of a streak that also included A League of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle, and Big.
Big (1988) is the one that doesn't always get called a Tom Hanks film even though it's the one that made everything else possible. A 12-year-old makes a wish at a carnival fortune-telling machine and wakes up in an adult body. Hanks plays genuinely small, the character reads children's menus, sleeps in a sleeping bag, doesn't understand what flirting is. It's a physical performance hidden inside what looks like a high-concept comedy.
Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993) was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to deal with AIDS directly. Hanks plays an attorney who is fired when his HIV status is discovered. The film is earnest in the way that 1993 required (it's working against a wall of denial) and Hanks made it work anyway.
Cast Away (2000) keeps Hanks alone on screen for most of its runtime, opposite a volleyball. That's the film. It works.
Forrest Gump is about a man with a low IQ who witnesses several decades of American history. It won six Oscars. It beat Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption for Best Picture. Film Twitter brings this up about once a month and then everybody moves on because there's nothing to be done about it.
🔵 Hard: Sports Underdog Triumph
Movies: Rocky · Hoosiers · Rudy · Cool Runnings
These four films did not invent the sports underdog story. They simply defined it so completely that every sports film made after them is in conversation with one of them whether it wants to be or not.
Rocky (1976) is the one Stallone wrote himself in three days after watching Chuck Wepner go the distance against Muhammad Ali. Rocky doesn't win the fight. He goes the distance, which is the whole point. The training montage, the run up the steps, the freeze-frame punch, these became grammar.
Hoosiers (1986) is the truer story: a small-town Indiana high school basketball team wins the state championship in 1954 against a school five times larger. Gene Hackman as the new coach, Dennis Hopper as the alcoholic assistant. The film is genuinely lean. It earns every moment of the finale because it made you watch every moment of the failure.
Rudy (1993) is the one where the triumph is a single play. Rudy Ruettiger gets dressed for one game at Notre Dame (he worked toward this for five years) and sacks the quarterback. The crowd chants his name. He gets carried off the field. That's the whole victory. The film understands that it's enough.
Cool Runnings (1993) is based on the real Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. John Candy as the disgraced former champion who coaches them is the performance the film lives or dies on. He's warm and then he's specific and then there's a scene at the end that hits harder than any sports underdogs film has any right to.
🟣 Tricky: Films That Take Place in a Single Frenzied Night
Movies: After Hours · Collateral · Go · Superbad
After Hours I've already given the introduction it deserves. Paul Hackett is trapped in SoHo in a city that doesn't know or care who he is, and the film's comedy comes entirely from how reasonable each individual bad thing is and how collectively impossible the accumulation becomes. Scorsese shot it for $4 million between The King of Comedy and The Color of Money, as a palate cleanser. The palate was not cleansed.
Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) is a hired killer (Tom Cruise, silver hair, extremely good in this) who takes a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) hostage for a single night of contracted hits across LA. Mann shot it on digital video to make LA look the way it looks at 2am, sparse, fluorescent, beautiful. Foxx got the Oscar nomination; Cruise didn't, which remains a puzzling call.
Go (Doug Liman, 1999) runs three interlocking storylines from the same Christmas Eve. A drug deal. A rave. A honeymoon car chase in Las Vegas. The film is aggressively 1999 in the best possible way and it moves like it's not paying attention to anything that would slow it down.
Superbad doesn't need the description. Two friends trying to buy alcohol for a party, a subplot about cops, everything going wrong in sequence and then eventually going right. The film earns the ending it goes for because it spent 90 minutes building the specific friendship it's about.
The structural kinship between the single-night films is that they all depend on the city as an antagonist. SoHo, LA, wherever Go is set (it's Vancouver pretending to be elsewhere), and suburban LA. The city doesn't hate these characters. It just doesn't notice them, which is worse.
Today's PixelLinkr puzzle had a Rare group and a games-with-fictional-languages group, the second of which requires the same patience as a night in SoHo with no cab fare.